Back to The Center of The World

Installation/Archival , 2017
This work was shown at The MET, Quito in 2020, at Museo de Arte de a Universidad Nacional, Bogotá in 2019 and in Espacio el Dorado, Bogotá in 2017.





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“Bermudez constructs a taxonomy of the Humboldtian variations on the American landscape. To do this, he uses archival work, through the obsessive pursuit of prints and books of travelers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracking the variations, stereotypes, imaginaries, perceptions, exoticism and political constructions of that pictorial collage that was the Americanist painting of the nineteenth century.

This universe of meaning that has lasted long to us (and that has helped to build power relations between nations and people). The images will need to be analyzed; we will have to understand their images, how they were built, assembled and disseminated. We must begin to deconstruct the universe of imaginary forms that not only inhabit those old engravings (but also within us): a universe that populates our mind and shapes the senses; we will have to dismantle that intricate collage that builds us and explains us.”

Halim Badawi, Art critic.











“I was able to show how the outdated colonial gaze upon South American landscape is still imbued in official representations of this territory.”










"In other words, the construction of the Andean landscape -and of American nature- was a process of visual epistemology in which knowledge was created, influenced by the origin of the travelers and by their personal contemplation. The Andean landscape was shaped by comparison and decontextualization by those who did not inhabit the territory in the 19th century. This produced an image culturally constructed by curiosity about the foreign, which allowed a discursive function in the images of the Andes when they were discussed.(...)This situation implied the transposition of the concept of landscape from European to American nature, a movement that marked the historical processes of identity in the continent from the knowledge that was being formed".


Luis Rey Celis, Art Historian




















proyectos.boa@gmail.com